Mammoths Poems | Examples

Monumentally Massive Pet

What kind of pet did Harry bring home?
Not from Alaska, Italy, Corinth or Rome
Massie and mastadonic, my mama said.
But aren’t all wooly mammoths kind of dead?

Woolly Bully Mice

Huge woolly mammoths have long been extinct
Why create creatures that are to T-Rex linked? 
They were frozen in ice
Don't remake them from mice
Am I clear or should I be more succinct?

Not One Inch Has Length

Heaven has not left
the long dead bone,
alert mouse whiskers,
still move the seven seas.

At the beginning and the end
there is nothing to come,
that has not come and is.

Mammoths stride
a thousand leagues,
over a single blade of grass.
One small sparrow -
an Ark for infinity.

All that is,
is but one single event.

The speckled hen
lays worlds within worlds.

The unbridled beaks of seagulls,
unlock a book,
of common prayer.

Yabba Dabba Don'T

Here we go again -
another crazy form to try - this time
a 'Yabba Dabba Do' or so it's called.
The jury's out; I can't say I'm enthralled.
I've not made a connection to the rhyme
or figured out how best with such a silly form to dabble.
I guess it truly is no more absurd
than having wooly mammoths pumping gas,
or dinosaurs and humans there en masse,
or roasting pterodactyls like they're birds.
Wilma, Fred, Barney and Betty, relegated to the past;
methinks this jab will do the same, and will be my first and last.

----------

Probably ought to give it a better shot, but this one is a 'Yabba Dabba Do'
12 lines: xabba xcddc ee, with 5/10/10/10/10 15/10/10/10/10 15/15
The form description at poet's collective was not that clear -
repeated the abba in the pattern, but then the example did not

Full Carriages Trundle On

I don't have a return ticket
not sure if this train
is coming from somewhere or going onward.

In the next seat a 'mick' relative,
we converse in a grunting verse.
Rough hands caked with unspoken words
indicate long pauses.

On the move trying to recall
something familiar, a town, a stretch
of passing scenery. A once fractured memory,

Some kid is beating a tin toy drum
I think it is me, his short pants are dark blue,
they are too tight;
he is going to the seaside one day.
The child is annoying.

A journey battles on.
it whistles through the bygone:
will someone meet us in loco parentis?
I am an outgrown poet full of the Irish,
I am a jigsaw piece
for the numbed seekers of unfilled holes.

This is a video game,
this is a play station
with play passengers
getting on and leaving.

Bareboned is the bodkin that grooves
a map far from anywhere.
Passengers stare out of my window
I begin to count the eyes.

I have much time to ponder,
to wonder if this rattling line
has an end
or perhaps has been pulled up
long ago
by ice Mammoths?

On the Proximity To Art

Museums are quiet except
For crackling parquet floors,
Wooden squares, a game board:
Checkers or maybe chess 
Of various right angle, grain striations.

Parallel to paintings in oil, red lines
Begin a court for pickup basketball.
But whether subjects of famous battles
Or romances between animals and gods,
They are stuck in a frozen frame moment

Like mammoths in some La Brea Art Pit
It is this instant we are to see anew
Each brush stroke, a wisp of hair,
A dab of white, a cloud condensing,
I lean close.

An unseen alarm makes a statue come alive,
A funerary, votive docent who guards
Mesopotamian and Egyptian antiquities.
She curses me in hieroglyphs translated
And dictated from an Old Kingdom tongue.

My crime: too close to art.
As if my admission, and apology
Were not punishment enough.
I could have cast my eyes
At strangers surrounding me.

Vatican visitors are permitted
To touch the Pieta statue for luck.
Suspecting it has only so many
Touches before marble succumbs,
It’s luckier not to take a chance.              (1/30/02)

Winter Iv - Snowstorm In Michigan

Sails of snow
Hoisted
To the roar of northern wind

Wires wild
Leashed to masts
Banging like spoons on pots and pans

Sea of Earth lurching
Beneath
The creaking planks of our house

On we go
Tossed and turned

The bow of our kitchen
Cutting through slaps of whitecaps
Windows sinking

Chimney smoke whipping from the rooftops

Bushes plumed and weighed down
To their knees
With buckets bailed of snow

Swaying low
Like the last herd of wooly mammoths
Dragging themselves down the street

A march to oblivion

The storm subsides after three nights and two days
Though the trees continue to throw snowballs
On their own

We emerge
Michiganians

Terrified sailors
Transformed
To butlers and maids

Sweeping and dusting
Shoveling and chipping
The destruction
From the wrecked decks of our driveways

Signaling at dusk to one another
Through flashlight Morse code

All is well
All is well

We survived.

The Third Voice

A dark and faceless bedroom
consents to talk with me awhile.

The brain buzzes on
being its usual endless 
blunt toothed saw. 
The body belches and rumbles
as it tirelessly works to produce 
the odd snort or snore.

All is a normal stasis on an escalator
speeding to nowhere,
Just the random outtakes 
from under-rehearsed thoughts
dropping like dying mammoths
into tar pits of forgetfulness.

Beyond all these moving parts 
is a soundless voice,
a voice I realize I had left somewhere
returning now to show me 
where a loss had occurred.

It was there at a bifurcation 
in a nowhere place.
that two voices grew deaf to each other,
but now in this instant 
the voices have become
a synchronized dance of one.

I am translucently unilingual
through my mouth and ears.
An oceanic speech
funneled through a shell of self.

This is how the All speaks, said one voice.
This is how the All listen, said the other.

A third voice said:
and here is the holiness of silence.

The Trees and the Birds

I have to say, this isolation doesn't appear to be affecting me at all.

I was thinking... The wind must come from somewhere.

Do the trees make the wind with their ceaseless moving around?

“KKKeeeeepp STILL!!” I shriek at the trees from my bedroom window but they pretend not to hear. Science says trees can talk to each other over some secret, underground, filament-like network - so I know the ba$tards are listening.

And I don’t know about this new generation of birds - these tearless, happy birds that chirp just to be fashionable. They annoy me when they pretend to be unaware of the value of silence.

“Shut UP!” I scream at a speckled bird who stares down at me like I’m insignificant.

“Yeah, the woolly mammoths ignored us too,” I remind it.

I give it the two-fingered, back and forth “Yeah, I’m watching you” gesture.

Then it just chirps right past me, as if I don't exist. Aaarrrgghhh!

So I give that bird the bird.

M Is For Mammoth

M is for mammoth, big as a barn,
with long woolly hair that's much warmer than yarn.
He's 15 feet tall from his toes to his head,
(much too big to keep in the gardening shed)
He's got really big tusks and he weighs 13 ton,
and he stomps on saber tooth tigers for fun.
He wandered the plains munching bushes and grass,
when a blizzard surprised him and froze his fat mass.
5000 years later when the weather was nice,
it thawed just a bit and he burst from the ice!
The scientists flocked round to skin and de-bone him,
with a bunch right behind who were hankerin' to clone him.
If the cloning succeeds and the Doc's have their way,
We'll be hip deep in mammoths the very next day!
Then us gardening folk can despair of our broccoli,
cause its tough enough dealing with crows by the flockly,
and raccoons by night, and woodchuck by day, 
and running 'round chasing Mizz Bunny away.
We all know for a fact that no chicken wire fence,
will keep out a mammoth. (they're just too immense)

Garbage Men

Trailing steel cans
and rolling out their
long rags.

The morning is a frost
broken in clamorous relief.

Frayed holes in their eaten
gloves carry a crushed chore,
a rotted job bundled in skins
of wet plastics.

They emerge from a deep 
hidden hour
riding the back jaws
of neglected mammoths.

A storm hammers
in the scrape of their tongues.

The dogs lunge
for their voices.

They remove what lingers too long
from our past.

Published Black Buzzard Press 1982

Inventive Humans

We invented the spear, and the mammoths were dead.
Then our flintlocks and muskets filled bison with dread.
Next came chainsaws and oil:
planting bones in the soil.
What new wonders I wonder will spring from our head?

Elephants

Elephant skin is bark-like and rough,
advanced to a crisp, leathery tough. 

The great Milky Way could not be so large, 
nor so grey as the elephant’s muscular trunk

with aged-to-stone sinew—a supple, flannel hunk.
The overcast skies toss a dullness on the day -

somber and muted like the grey in the way 
of the elephant—its color worn unconsciously,

innocuously, and steadfastly. There is a mythos 
about elephants that depicts them as ponderously, 

lumbering mammoths, hulking and bulky as a brand-
spanking, new heavy-weight, woolen sweater —yet

they are most agile and keen creatures whose 
clumsiness is widely over-stated and over rated.

For intelligence, communication skills, and memory 
they cannot be bested –  fascinating creatures, the elephants.

Clearing Ice

Mammoth cold this morning.
There’s been an ice-storm.
Stiff-meat meets chilled ribs, 
I am creaking and walking
shovel in shrinking hand.

Robins pounce on frozen worms
Siberian tigers in a flying flurry;
if they stop for a moment
death and life falls over everywhere.

I work the wide-plastic spade
its red mouth scooping 
a deep glacial gravity,
pausing only to sag
under the wind's frigid whips,

An old guy shoveling snow
can have heart failure,
better to go this way though
than sitting on the toilet.

Mammoths are now snow piles,
broken branches protrude like tusks.
I lean on my shovel,
watch the robins 
shake off crystals of sky
from heat-hugging wings.

See how hectic they fly?
Some may fall by evening;
in this kind of freeze
death and life falls over
everywhere.

Goldie Locks Gets Another Visit

Trudging through the snow, her cubs lag behind...oblivious 
Haven't seen a seal for days, perhaps weeks 
There are few ice-bergs left to hunt upon 
Adrift in the ocean...think again 
It's not a coincidence fossils of mammoths are being found more than ever
Soon you won't need your pithy pants...or snow shoes 
Soon...someone might be sleeping in your bed 


Pithy Pants 2 Poetry Contest 
Sponsored by Maureen McGreavy
2/14/2019

• Short Mammoths Poems
• Famous Mammoths Poems
• Best Mammoths Poems
• Read Mammoths Poems
• Long Mammoths Poems
• Mammoths Quotes